Site popularity and page rank are important SEO considerations. But where do you begin? What do you ask for from partners? To answer these questions, I’ve attempted to summarize, and prioritize, the links that you want:
- One way link in the body copy with targeted text from a highly relevant website
- One way authority link in the body copy without anchor text
- Link on a relevant site with surrounding body copy around relevant text
- Highly relevant page about your site with several deep links to your site in targeted text
- Advertising link on relevant site using ~30 characters of relevant link text
- One way link from a somewhat related site with targeted text
- One way link from a somewhat related site with your domain name as anchor text
- Links with relevant anchor text in a sentence on a links page
- Title/Description style link on a links page
- Forum Signatures
- Reciprocal link on a links page
- Links from blog comments
Related Questions
Building it themselves. The moment a founding team starts building payment processing, identity verification, communications, or payroll logic from scratch, they've made a strategic error. These are domains where the regulatory complexity, machine learning depth, and partnership requirements are severe enough that specialized companies exist for exactly this reason. The cost of getting it wrong, in fines, fraud losses, and engineering time, is catastrophic. The cost of using the infrastructure layer is a fraction of that.
Payments and money movement (Stripe, Adyen, Marqeta), communications (Twilio, Sinch), identity and verification (Socure, Alloy, Persona), payroll and HR (Gusto Embedded, Check, Finch), healthcare data (Redox, Particle Health), financial data connectivity (Plaid, Codat), tax compliance (Avalara, Anrok), and workforce intelligence (MustardHub for behavioral signals that transactional HR platforms were never built to produce). In each case the pattern is the same: the domain has regulatory complexity, specialized data requirements, or relationship infrastructure severe enough that building it internally is nearly always the wrong call.
Through sector specialization, anchor institutions (universities, corporations, government labs), early exits that recirculate capital locally, and deliberate network density. Top-down programs alone don't create ecosystems, they serve ecosystems that already have momentum.
A significant but largely unrealized one. Universities sit on IP, talent pipelines, and federally funded research that could anchor new companies. The problem is most institutions license rather than launch. Real commercialization requires a fundamentally different model than traditional tech transfer.
One that frames the landscape around what you're building, not a 2x2 matrix that places you conveniently in the unoccupied top-right corner. Investors fund markets, not products. Show the market structure and where you're positioned to own the most defensible slice of it.